Joan Oates Institute

2024 Summer Course

Monday, June 10 – Friday, June 14, 2024

8:30 AM - 4:30 PM (tenative)

This five-day course will be held in-person at the University of Richmond. Breakfast, lunch, and snacks are provided each day.

It's just good teaching

The Joan Oates Institute (JOI) trains PK-12 educators and community experts to engage and empower all students through creative and experiential methods, reflection, and collaboration.

Participants will experience hands-on workshops that integrate community and culture into your instructional practice through the arts and technology.

Who should attend?

PK-12 Educators

Current teachers, administrators, specialists, coordinators, and coaches can register for the course for graduate credit at our discounted PD rate, or as non-credit professional learning. Current degree-seeking students may enroll as an elective.

Community Artists and Experts

Individual teaching artists, arts and cultural staff, informal educators, community professionals, and subject matter experts should register for Professional Learning. Please inquire if you are interested in graduate credit or pursuing a degree.

Transformative Professional Development

This institute will transform how you teach. Educators will learn from and with regional and national-level artists and experts this summer, with time built in to each day for collaborative planning best practices.

The driving question of our training is, “How do we learn?” This informs the thinking tools we provide so that you can connect curricular content to real-world experiences for students, practicing place-based education and supporting social emotional learning.

Powerful Outcomes

You will discover a teaching and learning model designed to engage your students in deep and culturally responsive learning, both inside and outside of the school setting. View the modules in the drop down menus below for descriptions of each workshop and instructor.

In this course, you will learn how to:

  • engage and empower students by connecting their backgrounds and interests to community expertise and resources
  • integrate diverse cultures to help students contextualize curriculum in the real world
  • explore big ideas through lenses of multiple disciplines in an interactive, hands-on setting
  • provide a range of creative mediums to assess comprehension in authentic and innovative ways
  • develop interdisciplinary lessons and unit plans to use in your teaching
The course may be taken for up to 50 hours of professional development, or as a graduate credit course eligible for tuition reimbursement by many school divisions.

Course Details

Expand All
  • Objectives
    • Understand the philosophy, techniques, and impacts of a multimodal, interdisciplinary approach to teaching
    • Practice inquiry-based educational methods that incorporate arts, technology, culture, and community, and examine how they influence academic and social-emotional outcomes
    • Learn how to view and apply the arts to curricular instruction and assessment with students
  • Outcomes

    Participants will create an educational plan to integrate the arts into their local school curriculum, learn about arts integration resources, and join a network of professional colleagues interested in integrating creativity and sparking curiosity in classrooms. The innovative lessons and unit plans developed in this course can become the basis of a grant proposal, PBL, or IB project.